Maybe I’m being over-optimistic by broadly ascribing this epiphany to the entire “Left.” After all, the article title my headline riffs on — “Women Don’t Think Alike. Why Do We Think They Do?” — appears in Friday’s New York Times.
The piece is by Susan Chira, the Times’s editor on gender issues, who seems to be the first person on the Left to make this astonishing discovery. She writes, as if she had uncovered some ancient scroll that unleashed a startling eternal truth:
[W]omen don’t automatically ally with other women, as Senator Susan Collins’s vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court demonstrated. Sisterhood doesn’t override partisanship or deeply held moral views. Victims of sexual harassment didn’t all believe Christine Blasey Ford. Women don’t act as one.
The question is why so many people are still surprised that they don’t, even after the election of 2016.
Clearly, Chira didn’t speak with the loser of the 2016 election, who told NPR’s Rachel Martin during a 2017 book promotion tour about a “sobering conversation” she had had with the Times’s Sheryl Sandberg that helped her understand why she lost:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
And Sheryl ended this really sobering conversation by saying that women will have no empathy for you, because they will be under tremendous pressure — and I’m talking principally about white women — they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for “the girl.”
Note that Clinton blames her loss on two factions despised by the Left: men and white people (which includes some women). But not even all white women think the same way. If you go back to the makeup of the Senate Judiciary Committee, you find another white woman besides Susan Collins in the person of Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee. No one should know better than Hillary Clinton that all white women don’t think the same way since she is herself a white woman.
The slippery worldview liberals have fashioned for themselves in which every group can be neatly labeled and compartmentalized — whether it’s women, blacks, Hispanics, or even us dreaded white people — falls apart every time. Such is the nature of identity politics. It is shocking that the party that fancies itself to be intellectually superior still hasn’t discovered that.
